Matrimony and Recompense in Measure for Measure :: Shakespeare Measure Essays

Matrimony and Recompense in metre for Measure(A version of this essay appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (Winter, 1995), 454-464.) Since 1970, when the Isabella of behind Bartons RSC production of Measure for Measure first shocked audiences by mutely refusing to acquiesce to the Dukes offer of marriage at the end of the play, Isabellas response (or want thereof) to the Dukes proposal has become one of the most prevalent subjects for Shakespearean process criticism.See, for example, Jane Williamson, The Duke and Isabella on the Modern Stage, The Triple Bond Plays, Mainly Shakespearean, in Performance, ed. Joseph G. expenditure (University Park Penn State UP, 1975), pp. 149-69 Ralph Berry, Measure for Measure on the Contemporary Stage, humanities Association Review 28 (1977), 241-47 Philip C. McGuire, Speechless Dialect Shakespeares Open Silences (Berkeley U of California P, 1985) and Graham Nicholls, Measure for Measure Text and Performance (London Macmillan Education, 1986) . However, wariness to this issue has tended to overshadow another ambiguous aspect of the same breaker point sequence the question of why the Duke asks Isabella to marry him in the first place. It is by and large agreed that the text provides no evidence to suggest a amative attachment to Isabella on the Dukes part until the moment of his proposal, but the plays fix up score reveals a pattern of attempts to supply what the text lacks, either through stage business or interpolated declarations of love. Hal Gelb notes, Critics and directors have so keenly felt a sense of the marriage as a tacked-on after-thought that they have sought shipway to prepare it earlier in the play (Duke Vincentio and the Illusion of Comedy or Alls Not Well that Ends Well, SQ, 22 1971, 31). These attempts, based on a culturally specific conception of matrimony as prompted by erotic desire, pretermit other textually prominent motivations for marriage grounded in Renaissance moral, social, and financi al concerns. Ann Jennalie Cook, analyze contemporary notions of marriage to those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, writes, Despite the romantic ideas show in plays and poetry, most marriages were contracted on the basis of interest sooner than affect. Society demanded a legitimate male heir to preserve the family observe and properties. Moreover, the financial arrangements of a marriage settlement were essential to insure that both parties could live securely until death. Marriage was also viewed as the safest outlet for the parasiticidal discharge of sexual appetites.